False False Equivalence

I was recently watching a presentation with a friend who believes that the global warming crisis is overblown. The presentation was from a skeptic scientist, and it was full of misleading statements and graphs.

Not surprisingly, I ended up with a very negative impression of the presentation and of the scientist himself.

My companion, on the other hand, liked the presentation. Not because he thought the talk was much more accurate than I did, but because the talk raised issues with observations and consequences of climate change that alarmists tend to gloss over.

He gave the lack of accuracy a bit of a pass because, on the whole, the audience was probably made aware of issues it hadn’t previously considered.

My response was that any time someone is presented with misleading information, their ability to consider its meaning is severely compromised. Two bits of wrong and conflicting information simply don’t allow someone to draw the correct conclusion.

Which of us do you agree with?

If you agree with me, now consider the following: suppose the presentation was by someone claiming that all sorts of extreme weather were increasing in frequency in the United States because of climate change. The list includes tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and droughts.

In reality, those things are either not increasing in general or they’re increasing so slowly that it would take another half-century or more to detect such an increase. In the case of floods, for example, infrastructure and public safety improvements seem to have kept pace with the climate-induced increase in heavy downpours.

But, you might say, at least this is raising the public’s awareness of climate change and countering the false impression left by skeptics that climate change is not real or not a big deal.

I agree with you. But then that’s always been my position. That’s why, on the one hand, I criticize Trenberth for leaving out information that is adverse to his argument (here) and on the other hand, I’ve criticized Monckton for exaggerations he concocted (in whatever way he concocts them.)

I can accept that people can be mistaken. Obviously, I can be mistaken. But that’s different from thinking it’s ok to mislead in various ways that people find to mislead.

I will say that the problem with public response seems to be that too many people are unable to react appropriately to the threat without believing that they are being hit with impacts in the present. So what do we do about that? What do you as a scientist do about that?

PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by…
…
PAUL WEYRICH: As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

Tell the truth.
… Always telling the truth means always sticking to proven facts and context, and not simply stating what you believe to be true. That should be easy, because facts tend to have a liberal bias.
… you can have all the high ideals you want, but you have to deal with reality….
… when we’re just as negative …, it turns off the same people…. and gives voters the impression that both parties suck, that really gives most voters no reason to come out.

This is why we lose…. when turnout is low, and when we help them reduce turnout, we are actually undermining our own cause.

This isn’t just conjecture; the numbers bear this out….
… We can’t do that through negativity and falsehood…. a large portion of the voting populace doesn’t make a decision regarding who to vote for, but rather, whether or not to vote. If you’re an average voter and you’re trying to decide whether or not to show up on a cold November day and cast a ballot …. a lot of the problem is the garbage coming out of liberal blogs and websites that is either untrue or seriously exaggerated, as they do with so many stories ….”

I am always in favor of full and accurate knowledge, even if that knowledge undermines the things that I would like to believe are true. I think that I am more hostile towards those people with whom I actually agree when they use false or misleading information to support their hypotheses. I’ve also observed, repeatedly, that it is those ideas which I find most appealing and agreeable which I must scrutinize the hardest, to root out misleading or outright false claims, precisely because it is those ideas against which I have the least defense. If something “feels right,” I need to work twice as hard to be sure that it is actually true.

Presenting facts and data is one thing, that should always be accurately done. However, as we know, those with political agendas around this topic (left or right) want to exaggerate, obfuscate, and pontificate on the interpretation and significance of such data. That is where the mischief lies Dr. n-g.

> it was full of misleading statements and graphs.
> …
> I ended up with a very negative impression of the
> presentation and of the scientist himself.

I feel that way about scientists and their presentations, and also that way about bloggers (including scientist-outside-their-expertise bloggers) who are trying to either scare or sedate people. I quote them your earlier piece about climate science education, impossibility thereof, and the need to decide who to trust.

And I quote them http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_long_con/ — look at the kinds of advertisers that buy space in ‘conservative’ mailers; they know the target audience: very credulous people, who believe stuff they read without exercising common sense. People who can be discouraged by being confused.

> Any time someone is presented with misleading information, their ability to consider its meaning is severely compromised.

Could you expand a bit? (No, not like a greenhouse gas.) I had the opposite impression, viz. that misleading information was “packaged” to be connect with the targeted audience. If truthfulness was easy, we’d never be in our current predicament.

The problem is that any new information will be discordant unless it’s packaged (to mislead) in the same way. The listener can remain in the imaginary packaged world and be happy, but cannot step outside into the real world. – John

You say,
” In the case of floods, for example, infrastructure and public safety improvements seem to have kept pace with the climate-induced increase in heavy downpours.”

I hear what you are trying to say, but I think your statement is not necessarily true and misses some key points. The current infrastructure is not everywhere capable of keeping pace with the accelerating hydrological cycle or the shift towards heavier precipitation events. There have been several examples of that in just the last year– superstorm Sandy, the flooding in Europe this summer, the flooding this spring in the US midwest, the recent flooding in Alberta, the flooding in Manitoba….

Further, adapting to try and keep pace with the increasing frequency and severity of heavy precipitation events has an immense price tag, that cost cannot and should not be ignored. And that is not even taking into account the huge cost of repeatedly paying for damage following extreme events.

The hypothetical case you present is, unfortunately, very USA-centric, and is not as simple as aggregating all impacts in the USA together and concluding that drought is not increasing in the USA (i.e., drying western USA plus wetter east does not mean no change or impact). The impacts of AGW are indifferent to political boundaries, and the response will differ from region to region .

There is observational evidence that the intensity of stronger hurricanes is increasing, there is evidence that droughts and heat waves are on the increase in some parts of the world, including the US southwest, for example. There is also evidence that the damage associated from severe thunderstorms is increasing, even after accounting for changes in infrastructure, targets etc.

I do agree with you that in the case of tornadoes, some have incorrectly ascribed changes in tornadoes to AGW. The truth is that we simply do not have sufficiently reliable data for a sufficiently long period to conclude anything in that regard.

To summarize, I don’t agree with fake skeptics misrepresenting the facts or their willful and outright deception, nor do I necessarily agree with your hypothetical scenario.

Al – You’re right, things like droughts and floods are increasing in at least some places, for some extreme weather in a majority of places, but never everywhere. Most alarmists are very hesitant to talk about any improvements in any type of extreme weather frequency (except for cold waves) in any particular location. I don’t think the message has been conveyed to people that the Midwest drought of 2012 is an example of a particular extreme event in a particular location that is more likely to maintain or decrease its frequency than increase its frequency.

I’d like a reference for observational evidence for increasing intensity of stronger hurricanes. What I’ve seen says that if they do increase at the projected pace, it won’t be detectable for another half-century. Also, if you have a reference for more thunderstorm damages besides Munich Re (or a suitable riposte to RPJr’s criticism of the Munich Re study results as reported), I’ll take it.
– John

—-excerpt follows—–
“… as Google tracks more and more of your search history and search terms… it begins to automate confirmation bias at the search engine level. People already seek sites that agree to their philosophy… but now search engines exacerbate the issue as they attempt to only serve us sites that agree with us!

Anyway, that is the theory anyway. I was wondering if anyone wanted to do a test. Apparently, a major test is to google “guns”. For me, the NRA is not in the top ten results, but apparently other people get hits on the NRA.

My hits for “guns” on Google:
Four gun sellers
One Wikipedia article
One current events (Google news)
One image site (Google images)
…plus…
Two Wikipedia articles on Doppler radar and radar (the connection: police radar guns)
…and, bizarrely…
One hit on Yale Information Technology Services (where not even a web site word search using “guns” turns up any hits)

Definite personalization, based on my internet interest in weather radar.

“… the filter bubble as filter wall, making it increasingly more difficult to find common ground.

When applied to news, it can lead to what Johnson calls “reality dysmorphia,” a mismatch between what we deeply believe is true and what is in fact truth, reinforced by:
agnotology: culturally induced doubt—a co-option of “innocent until proven guilty” used to great effect by Big Tobacco, Big Oil, climate-deniers, et al.
epistemic closure: e.g., A is bad. A thinks B is good. Therefore B is bad. End of discussion.
filter failures: e.g, the unseen hand of algorithmic tyranny editing your Facebook newsfeed

Instead of broadening our horizons, technology is being used to narrow them….”

Sander et al. recently published a paper in an AMS journal on the subject of increasing damages from severe thunderstorms in the USA (east of the Rockies). Their analysis suggests that climate was the dominant driver for the increase in variability and average level of thunderstorm-related losses:

Following the seminal work of Webster et al. (2005) and Emanuel (2005) the following papers suggest that there is an increase in the intensity of tropical cyclones, especially over the N. Atlantic basin.

Sander et al. did not find increasing damages from severe thunderstorms in the USA east of the Rockies, when adjusting for changes in target value. They found higher variability: the worse years got worse and the better years got better. Furthermore, they couldn’t tell whether even that signal was anthropogenically-related.

Elsner et al. 2008 and Holland and Bruyère 2013 (I hadn’t seen that one, very nice, thanks) do convincingly show an increase in global tropical cyclone intensity at the high end. This is an important consequence of climate change. My example of a false statement regarded the overall frequency of tropical storms, which is not increasing.

Even at the high end, there’s a subtlety: United States landfalling hurricanes do not show a similar increase. This could be random luck or a global-warming-induced change in wind shear and hurricane patterns; I’d bet on random luck. Grinsted et al. (2012) is the only peer-reviewed paper to the contrary that I’m aware of, and they fail to convince me that their indirect measure of hurricane strength is superior to the NHC landfalling estimates, which usually benefit from nearby barometric readings even in the old days.

I think our reading of Sander et al. is different, and perhaps my wording was not carefully thought out. Here is a quote from their conclusions:

“From these findings we conclude that it is predominantly the change in hazard over time – rather than the change in destructible wealth or vulnerability – that has driven up normalized losses, as reflected in the strong similarity of the longer-term signals in Fig. 8.”

and

“As a conclusion, a high probability is assigned to climatic variations primarily driving the changes in normalized losses since 1970.””

If I recall correctly, the claim in your hypothetical scenario was that these phenomena were on the increase, not necessarily that a definitive link could be made to AGW. So Sander et al. do show compelling evidence, IMO, that there has been an increase in damages that cannot be attributed to economic and socio-economic changes alone, and that these changes are consistent with the changing storm environment (i.e., an increase in CAPE).

Good point about barometric readings for land falling tropical storms. Has anyone undertaken such a study? The 20th century reanalysis assimilates surface pressure observations, so I wonder whether or not that product would yield any clues? Googling……There are some papers on this coming out soon (e.., Truchelut et al. in J. Appl. Met Clim; Camargo also has some research in the works).

I agree with you that their are subtleties, and one has to be very careful how one words statements or claims about change sin these phenomena. Making an honest (or careless) mistake in that regard though is a lot different than fake skeptics willfully distorting and misrepresenting the facts so as to deliberately misinform and sow doubt/confusion.

I think we’ve converged. I don’t have access to the full paper, but from the context of the abstract they’re referring to the increase of normalized losses in the years with lots of damage, but meanwhile this is balanced by a decrease of normalized losses in the years with little damage. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I was referring to changes attributable to global warming. Without such attribution, there’s no contribution to an argument for mitigation.

For some reason, HURDAT2 is missing landfalling flags for 1946-1990. Here are my stats for wind speed for landfalling hurricanes between 26N and 42N:

“…increasing in frequency in the United States because of climate change. The list includes… hurricanes…”

I usually point out that AR4 says a decrease in hurricane frequency was likely, with an increase in intensity, which sceptic Ryan Mau says has happened in a post at WUWT. Not to alarmists, though, but to sceptics who say the IPCC said hurricane frequency would increase. I don’t think I’ve ever had a response to that, strangely.

John,
Why don’t you either give examples of what the presenter said that was wrong, or give a site to see the presentation. You gave a counter example, but I need to see the problems with the presentation to judge. I think all persons on both sides of the CAGW (or just AGW) issue have opinions, analysis or personal feelings, and it is very likely that some of this has some errors in all cases. Just because you spotted some parts you disagree with based on your knowledge does not mean you are more correct overall. I clearly have difference with many of your positions, but I always look for the strongest evidence I can find, and still admit I may be wrong on some issues. Much of the human caused global warming issue is so poorly understood that “post normal analysis” is used on many conclusions.

You say,“…but from the context of the abstract they’re referring to the increase of normalized losses in the years with lots of damage, but meanwhile this is balanced by a decrease of normalized losses in the years with little damage…”

That is most likely incorrect. Having had a good look at the paper I can’t honestly see where they address, conclude or imply that. So on that point I disagree, or should I say their paper does not support your interpretation. But like you, I am prepared to be shown to be wrong.

You are correct about attribution and warming, but they do indirectly address that via the C-C relation (i.e., warming -> higher low-level moisture -> higher CAPE).

There are of course multiple other datasets that indicate the oceans are warming and that the atmosphere is both warming and moistening, much of which is attributable to AGW.

As for hurricanes, I agree that the eastern seaboard has been relatively fortunate up until now. But those who try and downplay the future threat base don historical trends in normalized/adjusted damages and or landfalling tropical storms are really taking a gamble (and that with others’ lives and property). Furthermore, what is being excluded is that the new generation of tropical storms are likely to yield much more precipitation and that is currently not taken into account. I wonder if anyone has used the TRMM data to quantify that?

Anyhow, I’s better get back to work. Happy 4th of July for later in the week.

Al –
The C-C relation does not imply higher CAPE. The atmosphere is in a state of near-neutrality to vertical convection and to baroclinic instability. C-C says nothing about whether warming would alter that balance between instability and release of instability.
– John

Yes, of course. Sorry, that statement was poorly worded in my rush to get something off to you. In some regions (including the over the great plains) the low-level mixing ratio is increasing in step with the warming, and it is known that (all things being equal) increasing the low-level moisture increases CAPE (more so than increasing the low-level temperature) as was shown by Crook (1996). Kunz et al. (2009) present a nice discussion on this subject based on an analysis of sounding data in Germany. They found that for the period 1974-2003 there was a statistically significant increase in both low-level temperature and mixing ratio, with a concomitant statistically significant increase in surface-based CAPE and number of hail days.

But we are straying off topic. The main point of my previous point was that your contention was not supported by Sander et al., at least not by my reading of their paper.